Profile of George 'Doc' Rockwell on Famous Like Me

George Lincoln Rockwell (March 9, 1918 - August 25, 1967) was the founder and Commander of the American Nazi Party and perhaps the most notorious American neo-Nazi leader.

Biography

Early life

Born in Bloomington, Illinois of English-Scottish father (George Lovejoy Rockwell) and a German-French descended mother (Claire Schade Rockwell). Rockwell grew up with divorced parents, both of whom were famous vaudeville comedians and actors, where he learned his skills for speaking to and working with crowds. He studied at Hebron Academy in Lewiston, Maine. After quitting Brown University following his sophomore year, he joined the U.S. Navy where he served throughout the Second World War.

Politics

Rockwell heard radio broadcasts by Joseph McCarthy and supported Douglas MacArthur's nomination for Republican candidate for President of the United States. He attended a Gerald L.K. Smith rally and read Common Sense newspaper becoming introduced to the Jewish Question. He read Mein Kampf and was instantly converted to National Socialist belief. In 1952 he was posted to the US Naval Air Base in Keflavik, Iceland, where he met and married his second wife (Thora Hallgrimson), and honeymooned in Berchtesgaden. On March 8, 1959, he founded the American Nazi Party, under whose banner he ran for governor of Virginia in 1965.

George Lincoln Rockwell once tried to establish a conservative newspaper thinking it could be used as he explained to organize the "splinterd and squabbling right-wing into a cohesive, effective organization"

Assassination

At 12:20 p.m. EDT on August 25, 1967, as Rockwell was pulling his blue and white 1958 Chevrolet out of a parking space in front of the automat coin laundry where he had just dropped off his clothes, two shots were fired by a sniper on the roof of the Dominion Hills Centre strip mall. Rockwell attempted to avoid the shots by jumping into the passenger side of the vehicle when the bullets hit his car, but both shots went through the windshield hitting him in the head and chest. Rockwell struggled out the passenger door and died on the blacktop next to his car.

Shortly after the shooting twenty-nine year old John Patler was arrested and charged with Rockwell's murder. He had been seen jumping off of the rear of the shopping center by near-by residents. He abandoned his Mauser semi-automatic in a park creek several blocks away and was seen waiting at a bus stop at Washington Boulevard and North Inglewood Street by an Arlington, Virginia police inspector who knew Patler to be an associate of Rockwell's. When the officer stopped to question Patler, he began to run but was quickly arrested and held under heavy guard in the Arlington County Jail.

Patler, who had legally changed his name from John C. Patsalos, had been a captain in the American Nazi Party and was Rockwell's editor for the newsletter of the party, "The Stormtrooper". He wrote most of the newsletter himself. Some considered Patler to be co-founder of the organization along with Rockwell. In the first print edition of Rockwell's autobiography This Time the World. Patler was featured in a photograph in the opening pages carrying the party flag; which was edited out in subsequent editions.

After the murder Matt Koehl informed reporters that Patler had been expelled from the group in April of that year due to his "Bolshevik leanings". The primary accusation being that he was inserting Marxist propaganda into the newsletter of the party, The Stormtrooper.

Many former lieutenants of Rockwell, who had broken away from Rockwell's group to form "The White Party" only months before his assassination, stood up in a campaign that maintained Patler's innocence. John Patler was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for the murder of George Lincoln Rockwell in December 1967.

Rockwell's funeral was held on August 30, 1967 but the Pentagon denied his burial at Culpepper National Cemetery because his followers refused to remove their swastika emblazoned armbands before entering the cemetery grounds. His remains were returned to the headquarters of the American Nazi Party in Arlington where he was cremated during a secret Nazi funeral on August 31, 1967.

Trivia - The American Nazi Party moved out of the 6045 Wilson Boulevard office from the predominately residential Dominion Hills neighborhood to a more urban location in lower Arlington, Virginia for several years but eventually abandoned the Northern Virginia area for other climes as they realized that the urban Washington area was not sympathetic to their recruiting.

The office building where Rockwell's office was located is now known as the Dominion Hills Professional Center. The strip mall across the street where Rockwell was slain is still called the Dominion Hills Shopping Centre.

Today

Many of Rockwell's writings are available through the Internet today.

Portrayals

Rockwell was portrayed by Marlon Brando in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generation. Alex Haley had interviewed Rockwell for the April 1966 edition of Playboy.

Works

• In Hoc Signo Vinces, a political manifesto (World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists, 1960)
• How to get out or stay out of the insane asylum, recounts his experience of being sentenced to thirty days oberservation (American Nazi Party, 1960)
• This Time The World, his autobiography (written 1960; White Power Publications, 1979; Liberty Bell Publications, 2004, ISBN 1593640145).
• White Power (written 1967; John McLaughlin, 1996, ISBN 0965649288)

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article George 'Doc' Rockwell